Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 463

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This is vol­ume 463, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Why your smart­phone might be stop­ping you from fol­low­ing Jesus (Mar­tin Saun­ders, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “[Haidt] argues that smart­phones actu­al­ly dri­ve spir­i­tu­al degra­da­tion: ‘[social media] trains peo­ple to think in ways that are exact­ly con­trary to the world’s wis­dom tra­di­tions: Think about your­selves first; be mate­ri­al­is­tic, judge­men­tal, boast­ful, and pet­ty; seek glo­ry as quan­ti­fied by likes and fol­low­ers.’… our dig­i­tal cul­ture isn’t neu­tral; it’s offer­ing a kind of anti-dis­ci­ple­ship.”
2. Move Over, Math­e­mati­cians, Here Comes AlphaProof (Siob­han Roberts, New York Times): “A pair of Google Deep­Mind mod­els tried their luck with the prob­lem set in the 2024 Inter­na­tion­al Math­e­mat­i­cal Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of Lon­don at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath. The event is said to be the pre­mier math com­pe­ti­tion for the world’s ‘bright­est math­letes,’ accord­ing to a pro­mo­tion­al post on social media. The human prob­lem-solvers — 609 high school stu­dents from 108 coun­tries — won 58 gold medals, 123 sil­ver and 145 bronze. The A.I. per­formed at the lev­el of a sil­ver medal­ist, solv­ing four out of six prob­lems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-wor­thy per­for­mance on an Olympiad’s prob­lems.”
3. Stand­ing Out, Craft­ing Hooks, and Acci­den­tal­ly Reveal­ing Every­thing That’s Wrong With You (Max Nussen­baum, Sub­stack): “You wouldn’t think that people’s nat­ur­al instinct would be to reveal their full litany of psy­cho­log­i­cal issues in their pro­files, but it actu­al­ly is. They just don’t real­ize that’s what they’re doing.” About a year old.
4. Online opt-in polls can pro­duce mis­lead­ing results, espe­cial­ly for young peo­ple and His­pan­ic adults (Andrew Mer­cer, Court­ney Kennedy & Scott Keeter, Pew Research): “…sev­er­al recent stud­ies have doc­u­ment­ed large errors in online opt-in sur­veys due to the pres­ence of so-called ‘bogus respon­dents.’ These respon­dents do not answer ques­tions sin­cere­ly; instead, they attempt to com­plete sur­veys with as lit­tle effort as pos­si­ble to earn mon­ey or oth­er rewards. Stud­ies have shown that bogus respon­dents can cause opt-in sur­veys to over­es­ti­mate rare atti­tudes and behav­iors, such as ingest­ing bleach to pro­tect against COVID-19, belief in con­spir­a­cies like Piz­za­gate or sup­port for polit­i­cal vio­lence.”
5. Patron­age vs. Con­stituent Par­ties (Or Why Repub­li­can Par­ty Lead­ers Mat­ter More Than Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ones) (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…many dis­cus­sions of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics assume that that the struc­tures and oper­a­tional norms of the two par­ties are the same. If these par­ty dif­fer­ences were more wide­ly rec­og­nized, I sus­pect we would see few­er evan­gel­i­cals frus­trat­ed with their lim­it­ed influ­ence over the GOP par­ty plat­form, few­er jour­nal­ists shocked with J.D. Vance’s jour­ney from nev­er-Trump land to MAGA-max­i­mal­ism, and greater alarm among cen­trist Democ­rats about the longer-term influ­ence that the Pales­tine protests will have on the con­tours of their coali­tion.”
6. Evan­gel­i­cals Must Stop Their Pref­er­en­tial Treat­ment of the Left (James R. Wood, First Things): “Today, cen­trists and those on the right are more fer­tile soil, I believe, because they are more open to real­i­ty. They rec­og­nize that the cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies’ projects to rewrite real­i­ty are destroy­ing civ­i­liza­tion. These refugees crave clar­i­ty about basic moral real­i­ties because of how much con­fu­sion the neg­a­tive world has pro­duced. They are look­ing for voic­es who stand up to the civ­i­liza­tion­al destroyers—maybe even voic­es who bold­ly pro­claim super­nat­ur­al truths.Like the ‘god-fear­ers’ that ear­ly church mis­sion­ar­ies often tar­get­ed, we today need to con­sid­er the ‘real­i­ty-respecters’ in our mis­sion.”
   • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
7. Stan­ford’s biggest star lured to Texas Tech with $1 mil­lion deal (Alex Simon, SF Gate): “Canady announced her trans­fer to Texas Tech on Wednes­day, with mul­ti­ple reports quick­ly com­ing out that the Red Raiders’ name, image and like­ness (NIL) col­lec­tive Mata­dor Club, the group of boost­ers sup­port­ing Texas Tech by sign­ing the school’s ath­letes to endorse­ment deals, signed the pitch­er to a one-year deal for over $1 mil­lion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• News Hap­pen­ing Faster Than Man Can Gen­er­ate Unin­formed Opin­ions (The Onion)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.